Dershowitz: Being Black Doesn't Give You a License to Call People Racist

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) called Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's comments "absolutely racist" this week.

Dershowitz was being interviewed by Fox News and was giving analysis on which regions would be most favorable to the Trump side in a possible future trial (in terms of juries) when he noted that between a couple of options, "[Washington] has an ethnic and racial composition that would be somewhat less favorable to Donald Trump."

But Waters characterized Dershowitz comments as saying:

"What he's simply saying [is that] all of those black people are there and they don't like Trump, so he's not going to get a fair trial. And so they should take it out of that jurisdiction. It shouldn't be there to begin with. I don't like that. And I'm surprised that Alan Dershowitz is talking like that. And we will not stand for it. We will push back against that. Because that is absolutely racist."

Dershowitz replied later to Fox that Waters "should know better and does know better ... If I had said that race didn't matter, she would have called me a racist. She throws the term around so loosely and so inappropriately, and it weakens her credibility, because by calling everybody a racist, by calling me a racist, when she calls real racists racist nobody is going to believe her. Would she have called Johnny Cochran racist? ... Being black doesn't give you a licence to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you a licence to call people anti-Semitic."